I forgot to mention Lipidleggin’, by F. Paul Wilson. It’s not predicting wokeness – in fact, there’s a key distinction here, in that Wilson predicts a future where a government tyranny is trying to outlaw fatness rather than celebrate it – but it does have a line about them trying to ban Bugs Bunny cartoons because of the bad example they set.

Why the fuck is he wearing earmuffs?

Ottoman bureaucrats filed the letter under the name “Ricardo of Genoa” and never seem to have replied.

I wonder if – with this and the printing press both – Ottoman bureaucrats were just making sure they didn’t get boxed out by foreigners.

I’m starting to think that “Haha, round-eyes, superior Chinese civilisation invented it first!” is similar to George Washington Carver’s claim to have invented the peanut, i.e., cope and lies

Does Robocop not count as Woke Corporate dystopia? It’s certainly corporate dystopia. I recall the corporation in Robocop 2 being more woke.

Why track this all the way back to 1964 and then assume the CRA appeared out of nowhere? (Or purely to rectify certain injustices.)

White people were willing to fight and die on behalf of black people in 1860, and the anti-slavery crusade predates that by decades (and spans continents). Capt. Marryat was zinging equalitarians in 1836. Maybe wokeness is in our DNA.

After legacy admissions and affirmative action, what place for genuine merit remains?

There’s a third way that the meritorious are pushed aside: the narrow definition of merit. If you can sit still in school and respectfully parrot the ideas approved by the teacher, then you have merit; if you can’t, you have no merit, and possibly ADHD and Oppositional Defiant Disorder. Maybe even incipient fascism!

lmao @ this fucking dipshit getting people killed and patting himself on the back at how sweet his lasers are

I once got in an argument on this very topic with the sorts of people who read the New York Times. I assume they’ll be glad they can finally believe my lying eyes

Edit: apparently no-one else has mentioned, but supposedly a factor is that people’s headlights are often not angled downward like they should be. This was for various reasons that I don’t remember and can’t vouch for. (Seemed irrelevant to me, and the person telling me this was trying to tell me that headlights hadn’t gotten any brighter, so fuck him anyway.)

this being the 22nd paragraph probably only 1% of NYT readers are going to get this far

With modern technology, the NYT can actually quantify this effect, at least for online readers. And they probably already have. Whaddya reckon they’ll share the data?

The more progress was made, the more was it shown that slavery, which is so cruel to the slave, is prejudicial to the master… in the end the slave has cost more than the free servant…

And then of course there’s the impact on those who come after: the descendants of the master are themselves forced into a choice between continuing the institution; repaying the slaves with freedom and forty acres, and suffering those consequences; or freeing the slaves and committing the necessary cruelties to prevent those consequences (a.k.a. the Liberian option). That’s a hell of a choice to foist onto your grandkids.

We therefore see slavery is a selfishness not only with regard to the slave, but with regard to the master’s own kind and posterity.

I’d make a joke about pulling the demand curve forward, but I’m not sure what that actually means.

This is the plot of the original run of The X-Files

New builds precede all that though, and I struggle to see how new builds declining doesn’t help prop up the mortgage market, at least temporarily: mortgages were reliant on high house prices, and a constraint in the supply of houses, with demand remaining constant, ought to push them higher.

Totally off-topic, but does anybody know why new residential builds started a steep decline two full years before the ’08 crash?

Curious thing about Australia, where much of the country has had little-to-no lockdowns, masking, etc: precisely because of the success in avoiding the coronavirus (or more likely, luck), the threshold for lockdowns and masks and so on is incredibly low: as little as one case can suddenly trigger a fresh lockdown, a fresh mask mandate, and fresh quarantine requirements for travellers. (Naturally, this makes it impossible to plan ahead for anything.) Whereas in America, I suspect, that were a territory to reach zero cases, and then suddenly have a small resurgence, the fact that people are inured to thousands of cases per day means that, hopefully, they won’t panic. Time will tell.

Not racist: giving jobs, or just money, to well-connected black people

Racist: literally everything else

William Briggs gives the new aliens a good deboonking, complete with video where some enterprising individuals have recreated the latest batch of UFOs, thus proving them merely optical illusions.

It’s worth mentioning that UFOs ≠ aliens, so the Pentagon can plausibly claim that UFOs exist without actually claiming that aliens do. Everyone will assume the latter; but if a pilot sees a weather balloon but is unable to conclusively identify it as such, for instance, then that’s a UFO. Big deal.

As for why this is getting trotted out now, I assume it’s just another distraction: aliens! race riots! flat earth! war! Anything to stop people noticing that the government bungled the pandemic and the economy is a smoking crater, and other things of that nature. That it’s aliens in particular tells us they’re scraping the bottom of the barrel.

But maybe it’s simpler: maybe someone, somehow, is going to make money off of this. (Increased tourism to Nevada, maybe? Is a Nevada senator behind the push?) Or maybe it’s even simpler, like when various Harvard goofballs were given millions of dollars in the 50’s under the aegis of being spies and fighting commies, and they spent the money on funding artists and the like: maybe someone in the new administration finds aliens very interesting and is indulging himself.

…the West German air force.

Couldn’t Germany figure out how to make their own planes? I gather they used to be rather good at that sort of thing… Or was there no-one left after Operation Paperclip?

Come now, 1920 is hardly a turning point. It’s declining gradually since 1800. Look at the top-left corner: this is your politics on a limited franchise…

Steve, are you at all concerned that the person at BioNTech or Moderna in charge of making sure the vaccine doesn’t cause you to grow a second head after 18 months might have been a Kizzmekia Corbett?

Thank’ee kindly

When she squinches up her eyes, she look like maybe she’s part American Indian, a little.

But when Smith opens her eyes, she looks all white…

Recently I came up with a fun new card game I’ve been trying to sell to Hasbro: Foreign or Funny-Looking?

The game consists of a pack of 200 or so cards, each with a picture of somebody on it. The players simply have to guess whether the person pictured is, for instance, a normal-looking Asian man, or a white guy with unusually slanty eyes. Is that a Sicilian, or a Berber that’s been out of the sun?

I haven’t heard back yet.

One pound fer a pack of six, sorted

Btw how you embed picture

fruit loops

lol

Kellogg’s new LGBTQ cereal wants to fill your mouth with Pride

nice

Suck on some Pride

Swallow your Pride

Get yourself a hot load of Pride

Guy with a milk moustache: got Pride?

etc

Korea still has an uptick in excess deaths that need explaining. If not COVID, then what?

I don’t consider the mask-caused bacterial/viral/fungal pneumonia hypothesis to be disproven here. (Or proven.) If it were fungal, for instance, that would likely be very localised (and might explain international variation in death rates); Korea could have been spared.

There’s also the possibility – perhaps, as someone resident in or visiting Korea, you can confirm – that Koreans mask widely during flu seasons anyway – so mask-caused pneumonias in 2020 would not be “excess” deaths, because they would also have occurred in previous years. This would especially be the case if mask-caused pneumonias were predominantly viral.

I hope trained boffins are studying this possibility further.

In the graphic, the blue lines represent the “Predicted number of deaths from all causes” – predicted when, and how, and by whom?

Firstly, look at Steve’s graph: excess deaths are above baseline from pandemic start, even outside of those “waves”; and the third wave is bigger than the first two, which is weird. People should be more immune after a year, not less, so what was killing everybody?

I think you’re loading the dice a little with breast cancer: it’s true many of those screenings are a waste of time, and there’s an argument to be made that many mastectomies are unnecessary, only being performed because something benign gets picked up by the screening, and the doctor decides to err on the side of caution. (For the doctor, that is: I don’t wanna get sued, and anyway, it’s not my tits getting chopped off… Bonus: you get to refer the chick to your mate the plastic surgeon for cosmetic implants, and he repays you by letting you use one of his guest passes at the country club.)

But there are other fast-acting cancers that might’ve been caught by routine screening, but whose symptoms might not have become apparent until it was too late: some prostate cancers, for instance. And what about that persistent indigestion? Or those headaches you’ve been getting… it’s probably nothing… Maybe you’d double-check with your doctor, but there’s no call to be a hypochondriac while there’s a pandemic. The man’s probably swamped!

Then there’s all the heart problems and diabetes and various other weird diseases that might’ve been picked up early – including something as simple as obesity, which, although hardly invisible, nonetheless might take medical intervention to fix.

“Missed cancer screenings” is really better expressed as “Withdrawal from the medical system”.

Presumably, the medical system is doing something to dampen mortality, right? And it’s undeniable that interactions with doctors declined in 2020. So either the mass withdrawal from the medical system would cause mortality to rise, or doctors weren’t actually holding it down in the first place.

Obviously the most serious and obviously life-threatening medical problems were more likely to be attended to in spite of the broader withdrawal trend. But the point stands; even the New York Times concedes it.

In the period covered, the number of burials and cremations in 2020 was only slightly above the average.

There’s only one explanation: hundreds of thousands of unburied corpses must be lining the streets

Surely the fact that we have to spend time crunching the numbers to figure out whether a pandemic actually even happened is evidence that, whatever happened, it wasn’t much.

Australia had +6.8% mortality in 2019: nobody noticed.

I believe the logic is something like this: if, in 2019, you’d run 35+CT PCR tests for the latest rhinovirus on suspected influenza cases instead of testing for influenza, you would have had yourself a rhinovirus pandemic and a mysteriously vanishing flu.

I’m not sure whether this theory is correct, but I believe that’s the idea being put about. I suppose one way to get an inkling would be to see what proportion of presumed influenza deaths in previous years actually tested negative for influenza.

Still, one could equally well argue that the most likely source of non-covid excess deaths: i.e. deaths from ordinary non-contagious cardio-pulmonary conditions, which even in covid times were a larger source of deaths than covid, are also most likely to go untreated—and therefore become fatal—in the same times and places as covid case surges occur, as people avoid (or public officials deter) ordinary medical treatment they would otherwise seek.

Suppose NPIs have killed lots of people. Let’s divide those deaths into two categories, acute and chronic. (Or immediate and delayed.) NPIs rise and fall largely in conjunction with COVID cases, ergo acute NPI deaths will spike along with cases: e.g. heart attacks, as you say, or perhaps bacterial/viral/fungal pneumonias caused by breathing thru a dirty mask all day.

Chronic NPI deaths however will not follow the lockdown arcs, but rather their own longer arc: we might see them rising steadily for several years before beginning to decline. (This will be hard to detect with all the other fluctuations in the death rate.) This might explain why excess deaths remained higher than expected even outside of the three waves, and why the third wave was biggest and longest-lasting: maybe longer-gestating medical problems, like cancer or diabetes, had started killing people because they weren’t treated earlier in the year. Remember, supposedly it’s typical for a pandemic virus to kill less with each wave, as prior immunity has built up – and yet the third wave is bigger than the first, and takes much longer to subside.

To end on a positive note, after about 10 years or so we’ll have mRNA vaccines totally figured out.

Assuming that the technology is not a dead end. They never did make an mRNA drug or vaccine which passed safety trials pre-2020, despite thirty years of trying. Who knows what happens when they return to pre-crisis safety standards?

The Amerindians had reliable data that hollering late into the night around a roaring fire brought about the rain.

Covid is the religion of the Boomer Cowards. It’s been plainly shown that just about every single piece of data used to promote the justification of further progressive authoritarianism and to enrich big pharma even further has been doctored. You were duped Steve.

Re: that graph: how could we tell the difference if the vaccines were ineffective and the virus merely seasonal?

Either way: it’s not a problem because most of the cases are false. Isn’t that good news?

When it would actually make sense…

Can you always tell?

British woke-ists circa 2006 made a point of referring to the prostitute victims of some serial killer as “women who worked as prostitutes”. I’m not sure whether that circumlocution has been superceded in a more recent patch.

The Descent of Man

I remember that Twilight Zone episode

You think it’s a book about human ancestry but it turns out the aliens are going to make everybody live underground with the crab people

I don’t like it, last time Israeli PR was this bad they nuked the World Trade Centre

Schizophrenics and their loved ones have enough problems as it is without pundits like me, who ought to know better, making their lives harder by helping reinforce in the public mind a misimpression about schizophrenia by using a lazy cliche.

So I haven’t, to the best of my knowledge, used “schizophrenic” in the metaphorical sense in many years.

That’s a nice thing to do.

On the other hand…

Many people asking for sensitivity in language about mental health issues (or anything else) are disingenuous junior thought police, and “respecting” their “concerns” might actually make the world a worse place. Should you do the right thing if it helps the forces of darkness? Should you fight evil if there’s collateral damage? It’s a real-life trolley problem

“SPECIAL OFFER: This book has been signed by the author and physically handled by a notorious internet racist! $69.99!”

Diversity is the top justification for these hires, says Richard Vedder of the Centre for College Affordability and Productivity, a think-tank. Of more than 1,000 bureaucrats at Ohio University in Athens, 400 are superfluous, he reckons.

Controlled opposition: all are superfluous

Carjackings have been way up in Minneapolis, probably for joyriding/mugging purposes – I believe most of the cars are recovered, but could be talking out of my ass

Do they do “race-norming” for others races, or just blacks?

what he’s trying to say without saying it

what he’s trying to think without thinking it

The use of the word “process” as a verb used to be restricted to the bureaucratic: “Sorry, but we are still processing your paperwork.” Now, it’s used by culturati to depict the profundity of their thinking…

“Processing” is what computers do instead of thinking. These people are turning into robots.

Obviously, there are many studies which show high efficacy in reducing transmission risk, often in the ballpark of 80%, provided that both parties are wearing it. I’m sure you know that in science you will often find a study proving anything and their opposite as well.

I love this attitude: when the studies confirm your opinion, they’re to be respected; when they don’t, “Well, you can use science to prove anything!”

If you have any studies to refer to that aren’t modelling studies or laboratory studies – if you have any studies that examined the effect of masks in the real world and found them to inhibit transmission of respiratory viruses, I’m all ears. The Danish study was once such, and found no effect.

Masks stop droplets in a way that the droplets get attached to the mask. The mask constantly touches your face. Well, if it’s a droplet from the outside, it might eventually find its way to your mouth or nose. But if it’s your own droplet, it sure won’t find its way to the other people in the room. So yes, common sense tells me that ordinary surgical masks are better at protecting others.

Except, as mentioned, it’s aerosols, not droplets, that spread the virus, and many of these find their way through the filters or more frequently escape from the sides of the mask, mostly getting directed behind the person instead on in front. Big deal.

And the claim initially made regarding masks was that they inhibited infection, not just spread, i.e. they protected the wearer. I’ve seen absurdly high numbers floating around regarding efficacy at this, including from you just now. Now mask-enthusiasts want to move the goalposts to claim that the efficacy is greatly reduced in one direction, because it makes the mask’s inefficacy less clear: when the masked are getting sick, it becomes impossible to deny that masks don’t prevent illness; but who’s to say from whom the virus particles originated? It’d be difficult, if not impossible, to prove whether or not the virus spread from a particular person, i.e. a masked or unmasked person. So if you start with the assumption that masks are effective – an assumption many are keen on, if only to feel better about having been slightly short of breath for the past year – then this new paradigm cannot be so easily disproved, and you can go on making that assumption.

(By the way: if efficacy is one way, then transmission reduction does not require “both parties” to wear a mask: per your paradigm an uninfected maskless person is at the same risk of transmission as an uninfected masked person.)

There’s the fact that almost the entire medical establishment did not recommend their use prior to mid-2020

It was stupid propaganda back when there was an enormous shortage of masks. The idea was that the public would be dissuaded from hoarding or even using masks altogether, so that the medical establishment would have enough for itself.

I held your position in early 2020, but that’s because I didn’t know a damn thing about masks. I have subsequently revised my view.

But you’ve misunderstood me: when I say mid-2020, I don’t just mean that masks weren’t recommended in early 2020. If you want to believe that the medical profession believes that widespread masking could inhibit transmission during a pandemic, you need to explain why they were advising against this, not just in early 2020, but in 2019 and before. I’ve seen some people making the claim that doctors found masks to be effective during the Spanish flu, for instance. A false claim, but if you’re going to make it, you need to explain how it is that masks were found effective in 1920 and then considered ineffective for the next 100 years – and, again, you need to explain why scientists changed their mind in mid-2020, i.e., what new information came to light to persuade them all to change their minds. I have my explanation: as I mentioned, the BBC reports “political lobbying” at the WHO. But what’s yours?

[UK Influenza Pandemic Preparedness Strategy 2011, s. 4.15) doesn’t mean it’s worthless, just that you have to do it properly to achieve the full benefits. Yes, most people don’t remove them properly and don’t change them frequently enough, but there’s still some benefit. For example improper removal would get the virus on your hands. If you then touch your face or eat without washing them… but this is not a very easy route for the virus, with recent studies showing that inhaling the droplets is the preferred way for it. Also, if your nose isn’t covered, it’s basically worthless, but most people wear it properly.

Anyway, this text certainly doesn’t mean that masks are worthless.

You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink. Here I am showing you pandemic experts in official UK gov’t preparedness documents saying that (a) the perception that masks are helpful is false, (b) there’s basically no evidence that they’re a useful NPI, and (c) incorrect use and noncompliance alone mean that they’re not effective – i.e., even granting their effectiveness under ideal conditions – which the authors do not grant – they would still be ineffective in the real world.

Your response? That it works if done properly, that most people do so, and, implicitly, one can still achieve some benefit even from doing it improperly. Again: the available real-world evidence clearly shows that this is not the case.

Are you changing your mask every 20 minutes? Do you always maintain a tight seal around the face? Are you even wearing an N95 respirator or similar? Give me a break.

mild hypoxia

??

Oxygen deprivation. First link when I searched masks hypoxia. I would assume hypercapnia – too much CO2 – would occur more frequently, but I’m just a sperg on the internet, so I don’t know. And of course these are mild side effects, merely discomfiting for >99.99% of people I’m sure. (Although I did read one neuro-boffin who said otherwise.) The real danger from masks is in the increased risk – and increased severity – of pneumonias viral, bacterial, and fungal, from breathing through a dirty germ-ridden piece of cloth all day.

So why are they using surgical masks during, you know, surgeries, if they are so dangerous?

I don’t have the answer, but it’s an interesting question nonetheless, what with the research indicating post-operative infections decline in the absence of surgical masks. There were studies done in the 70’s and 80’s; there may have been more. And yet surgeons still wear masks. It’s a curiosity

Could be. It’s hard to say.

Currently most normies are still unaware of the likelihood that the virus was likely literally created in the Wuhan lab.

I don’t think so. Among college-educated shitlibs, they’re aware that this idea exists, although they reject it. (“It’s a conspiracy theory!”) Among more normal ordinary people, I think you’ll find a lot of people who assume this to be the case – who in fact assume it to be a Chinese bioweapon. A relative relayed a conversation with some old women where this was the universal assumption.

It’s not “my” science.

MASKS:

There’s the so-called “DANMASK” study, or the experience of the Dakotas, showing no difference in infection rates between those masked or unmasked. (Among many other examples.)

There’s common sense in regards to the claim that masks don’t protect the wearer but others from the wearer. (What, are they one-way filters?)

There’s the fact that it’s supposedly aerosols, not droplets, that spread the virus – and aerosols are often small enough not to be filtered by the masks, and in any case spread around the edges of the mask and out into the air in great number anyway.

There’s the fact that almost the entire medical establishment did not recommend their use prior to mid-2020, and only changed their tune, per the BBC, after political pressure.

And there’s the UK Influence Pandemic Preparedness Strategy 2011:

Although there is a perception that the wearing of facemasks by the public in the community and household setting may be beneficial, there is in fact very little evidence of widespread benefit from their use in this setting. Facemasks must be worn correctly, changed frequently, removed properly, disposed of safely and used in combination with good respiratory, hand, and home hygiene behaviour in order for them to achieve the intended benefit. Research also shows that compliance with these recommended behaviours when wearing facemasks for prolonged periods reduces over time.

This is the tip of the iceberg on evidence against the efficacy of masks. You should really read up on it before subjecting yourself to the discomfort and indignity (and mild hypoxia, increased risk of viral and bacterial pneumonia, etc).

One more bit of common sense: masks have been around for thousands of years. Why didn’t anybody notice before 2020 – or before 2003 in Asia – that they supposedly stop the flu cold? Answer: they don’t.

SOCIAL DISTANCING

Social distancing is more complicated. There’s more of a history of some forms of social distancing – for instance, school closures and mass gatherings – but I’m not sure there’s much evidence for it. The aforementioned UK planning document – as well as Australian ones – both mention only limited real-world evidence for the efficacy, as well as evidence from modelling studies, which of course should be tossed on general principles. (It’s interesting to note the difference in tone: the Brits and Aussies look at the same evidence but the Brits evince considerably more skepticism.)

Full-on lockdowns, on the other hand, or “stay six feet apart”: no scientific foundation whatsoever, totally arbitrary, totally ineffective and ridiculous. Sweden and Florida are the best examples here, faring no worse than anywhere else despite not locking down.

There is evidence, for instance – don’t remember where I saw it, sorry – that lockdowns/quarantines make things worse by forcing people to spend a lot of time together indoors, conditions where transmission is more likely. And of course, even if social distancing does work, it prevents the build-up of immunity, merely delaying the inevitable.

Finally, it’s worth mentioning that my claims do not require extraordinary evidence because they are not extraordinary. They are the accepted epidemiological and medical status quo of March 2020 and before. That the world shit its pants subsequently and changed tacks without evidence is a mark against your claims, not mine.

Millions have already died, including many hundreds of thousands of Americans, with a newly released research study by the University of Washington’s authoritative Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) now suggesting that our domestic death-toll has already exceeded 900,000.

“Authoritative”: hands up who had ever heard of this trusted authority before?

Their study is codswallop: they begin by presuming all excess deaths in 2020 to be COVID deaths; they calculate, globally, that pandemic control measures led to 400,000 to 600,000 fewer deaths; and while they pay lip service to the idea that these measures may have also killed people, they decline to count almost all of those deaths on the grounds of “limited evidence”. Unsurprisingly, they find COVID deaths to be undercounted.

What about Field Marshall Zhukov’s memories, were he kept advising Stain to mobilize and Stalin replied angrily: “Do you understand that that means war”? In short, as soon as the Germans see the Soviet Army mobilizing they will attack. Does that sound like a Leader who was planning an offensive?

It does not augur either way. It sounds like Stalin did not wish for war – but per Sukorov’s theory, Stalin was trying to hide his preparations for war in order to gain the element of surprise.

…how could Stalin be so sure that France and England would not declare war to Russia too? One part of the answer is that he had not broken off negotiations with Great Britain after signing a pact with Hitler. It is even thought that on 15 October 1939, less that two months after the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, a British-Soviet secret agreement was signed behind Hitler’s back.

I’ll have to read that, because…

With the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, Hitler thought he had countered the British encirclement policy against Germany. And he believed that the pact would protect him from a declaration of war by Britain and France if both Germany and Russia intervened in Poland. He had grossly underestimated Stalin.

[…]

The Soviets had waited two and a half weeks before moving into Poland, leaving all the fighting to the Germans and giving the world the impression that they were intervening to prevent Germany from seizing the entire country. The USSR thus remained officially neutral, and incurred no blame on the part of France and England.

…it stretches credulity a little to think that Hitler was merely bamboozled by Stalin, or primarily concerned with British encirclement; it also stretches credulity to think that France and England would be fooled by the Soviet pretense vis a vis Poland. (Perhaps it shouldn’t stretch credulity – perhaps I overestimate…)

I’ve wondered whether, just as Stalin hoped to fool the west, the west hoped to fool the east: perhaps, knowing or suspecting that Stalin intended to use Hitler as an “icebreaker”, they conspired to create a western front suited to Stalin’s needs, i.e., purportedly distracting Hitler, leaving his eastern flank vulnerable. This would’ve given all western parties time and an excuse to mobilise and escalate war production better to prepare for war against Russia. (It was called “the phoney war”, after all.) It would also have better enabled Britain (and perhaps France and the USA) to let Germany and Russia weaken each other – which would explain why they took so long to liberate France, and why they funded and supplied the Soviets.

Perhaps Stalin wondered the same thing:

The rapidity of the German victories was alarming, however. Stalin and Molotov would have preferred a slow, grinding, bloody battle of attrition—a German victory, yes, but one that weakened Hitler almost as much as his enemies. According to Khrushchev’s later recollection, after learning the extent of the Allied debacle later in May, Stalin “cursed the French and he cursed the British, asking how they could have let Hitler smash them like that.”

I’m also curious to know why war was unavoidable in the west once Hitler agreed to partition Poland. Perhaps this is because the west was compelled to resist the tremendous strength of the German-Russian alliance – but then, why didn’t they declare war on Russia, too? Why declare war over the capture of Poland, and not of Czechoslovakia? And so on. Many such questions!

These are weasel words in bold:

But this requires that the reduction in viral particles occasioned by masks etc is precisely enough to eliminate flu almost entirely without making a dent in COVID numbers.

Of course it doesn’t have to be precisely enough, it could be enough by a wide margin. Also, you don’t know if it made a dent in the covid numbers: it could have made a dent, just not enough to eliminate the virus.

My “precisely” was modulate by my “without”; perhaps you didn’t notice.

Beyond that, what I said was not weaselly at all: I stated my point outright, and moreover was perfectly correct. We have good solid scientific evidence on the efficacy of masks vis a vis COVID transmission, and the efficacy is approximately zero. We also have good solid evidence – apparently – of the near-total elimination of influenza, as well as, apparently, every other serious influenza-like illness except those caused by COVID.

This is difficult to explain if “masks etc” is your mechanism. You literally are left explaining that COVID’s R0 is high enough that it totally overcomes the efficacy of masks etc, but that all other respiratory viruses have an R0 low enough to be eliminated nearly entirely. You’re left positing some sort of hitherto uncharted “mask efficacy threshold”, poised just where it needs to be to explain the problem.

This is not an impossible thing, I suppose – I’ve been wondering it myself – but it is rather convenient, if nothing else, and still leaves us scratching our heads at how stark the difference above and below the mask efficacy threshold – i.e., below the threshold, masks work at near 100% efficacy, above at near 0%.

And it gets worse: you’re also implicitly positing a “social distancing efficacy threshold”, a “lockdown efficacy threshold”, a “border closure efficacy threshold”, a “track and trace efficacy threshold”… everywhere, any measure tried is, again precisely enough to eliminate the flu without impacting coronavirus.

And this is all presuming that R0 hasn’t been overstated for COVID.

I have to say Ron’s hypothesis, or something like it, is looking better all the time. But I still have my doubts.

I don’t think China has too much reason to keep schtum, for instance. America does not control the entire global mainstream media, and it certainly does not control the entire alternative media. China could easily sell this story to their own citizens, their own diaspora (which is sizeable), a large chunk of dissidents within American media territory, and many of the various non-aligned peoples. The only good reason not to, so far as I can see, is that it might be too much of an escalation at this time: if China announces to the world that America has poisoned it, then the Chinese people might expect the Chinese government to do something about it. But this is speculative.

An Avian Flu virus severely damaged its poultry industry in 2018 and the following year a Swine Flu virus destroyed over 40% of its pig population…

Chinese pigs are a major consumer – perhaps the biggest consumer – of America’s soy crop, the producers of which are very influential, perhaps especially with the Republican party. Are they happy that their politicians oversaw a multibillion dollar hit to their bottom line in 2019? And I imagine something similar could be said of Chinese poultry.

The Covid-19 outbreak appeared at the absolutely worst time and place for China, the major transit hub of Wuhan, timed almost perfectly to reach epidemic levels just as the Lunar New Year holiday spread it to all parts of the country, thereby becoming an unstoppable epidemic. […]

300 American military servicemen had just visited Wuhan as part of the World Military Games…

Those games were in October, and Chinese New Year is in January. Is that perfectly timed? I note also that the Chinese government locked down two days before Chinese New Year – therefore we must ask, did their lockdowns succeed in preventing the scenario Ron described, and in that case, how did it spread anyway? That is to say, if the American plan was to use New Year at Wuhan to spread the virus, and the Chinese successfully countered that plan, then either the plan succeeded in spite of itself or this was not the plan. (Or there was no “plan”.)

The characteristics of Covid-19, high communicability and low lethality, are absolutely ideal as an anti-economy bioweapon. It seems odd that a random lab-leak would release a virus so perfectly designed to severely damage the Chinese economy.

Did it damage the Chinese economy? It certainly damaged everybody else’s, with much of that damage being self-inflicted via our absurd pandemic response. But why nuke your enemy when you’re standing within the blast radius?

The best way to make sense of Ron’s hypothesis is that there’s a fracture in America’s elites, with those who profited from Chinese manufacturing in the past being a separate faction to the (probably military) faction that released the bioweapon. But the former has profited enormously from the pandemic, whereas the latter, thanks to the pandemic, lost control of the presidency (or did they?…) and damaged a major source of their power, i.e. the people. (This is not to say that this hypothetical anti-China military/Trumpist faction sincerely cares about the well-being of ordinary people, but that their institutional power derives more directly from a healthy prosperous society: the military recruits from the general population, which just gained 20lbs on average; the military is paid for by a tax base that just shrunk; the military relies on the goodwill of the population, and might lose it if it’s revealed that they’re the ones who killed your grandmother and put you out of a job; etc, etc.)

If the idea was to damage the Chinese economy, then tariffs and repatriated manufacturing could achieve that much more easily. I appreciate that the aforementioned pro-China elites might object to this, but again, these are the elites who profited most from the pandemic. The US did a good job of weeding out the communist fifth-column in the 1940’s and 50’s: surely this would be the first step towards damaging the Chinese economy, and would be damn sight more effective (and less counter-productive) than biowarfare and economic murder-suicide.

From almost the very moment the outbreak began, anti-China bloggers in America and our Radio Free Asia launched a powerful propaganda offensive against China, claiming that the outbreak in Wuhan was due to the leak of an illegal bioweapon from the Wuhan lab. This may have merely been an exceptionally prompt but opportunistic response of our propaganda organs, but they seemed remarkably quick to take full advantage of an entirely unexpected and mysterious development, which they immediately identified as due to a lab-leak.

It’s hardly a great leap to think that a deadly virus from China is a Chinese bioweapon, especially if you’re already an anti-China blogger. For myself – not a paid shill, more’s the pity – I jumped straight to that conclusion, then revised it to “lab leak”. It fit my priors, many such cases

By “the second week of November” our Defense Intelligence Agency was already preparing a secret report warning of a “cataclysmic” disease outbreak in Wuhan although according to the standard timeline probably only a couple of dozen people had started experiencing any symptoms of illness in a city of 11 million. How did they discover what was happening so much sooner than the Chinese government or anyone else?

An interesting tidbit that needs explaining. But there are explanations consonant with lab leak or zoonotic – for instance, some scienticians (I think Michael Yeadon, for instance) think that there was, in 2020, widespread pre-existing immunity to COVID-19; meanwhile, there is the relatively mild impact of the virus all throughout Southeast Asia, despite wide varieties of lockdowns, mask mandates, and border closures. (I would still like an explanation for Australia’s 6.8% jump in all-cause mortality in 2019. It was reportedly not due to Australia’s record-setting flu season that year.) One way to explain this would be that the virus was circulating throughout the region long before commonly thought – which would give the DIA enough time to detect or anticipate an outbreak via the transport hub of Wuhan. (Of course, this does not rule out the bioweapon hypothesis either.)

Almost immediately afterwards, the ruling political elites in Iran became severely infected, with many of them dying.

But COVID-19 has, per Ron, “low lethality”. So why did it kill so many elites in Iran?

I’ll say it again, the bioweapon hypothesis and other global conspiracies are looking better all the time, and the conventional explanations for COVID and associated phenomena are utterly ridiculous. But these kinks need ironing out.

Thanks bredren

Yes, I believe Virginia Postrel or someone similar wrote an article on the subject for Reason or a similar magazine 10 or 15 years ago. Of course, Taleb’s a charlatan and I’ve since found libertarians to be wrong about everything, so a grain of salt is needed.

Still: I mentioned in another comment that the decline in screenings would disproportionately affect the negative results, and the least pressing cancers (e.g. breast cancer, which is survived most of the time). If the tumours in your colon are so large that you haven’t taken a shit in six weeks, you are likely to go and see a doctor about it, COVID be damned.

Nevertheless: the decline in cancer screenings is just a yardstick we can use to infer the broader decline in interaction with the medical profession, which is very real and about as quantifiable as COVID cases, despite what the authors of this study say.

We are thus forced to one of two conclusions: either the widespread disengagement from modern medicine increased mortality and worsened quality of life – or it didn’t, in which case, what the hell are we paying all those doctors for?

Why don’t you look at data?

His point is that the data is often untrustworthy, and it’s a valid one. You refer to a study saying cancer deaths were decreased, rather than increased. But cancer screenings declined by nearly 10 million in the US in 2020. I think it’s reasonable to be skeptical that cancer deaths declined under those circumstances.

For instance: suppose I have cancer; suppose the cancer would’ve been treatable had it been caught in time, but I ignored that headache and as a result I’ve got a glioblastoma the size of a tennis ball bulging out under my scalp; suppose I’ve got three weeks to live, where I might have had three years; and then suppose, in my weakened state, I get the COVIDs and die from pneumonia. Does that get counted as a COVID death or a cancer death? (Certainly not a lockdown death, although that’s what it is.)

Alternatively, the uptick in traffic deaths is from all the long drives made by holidaymakers who would have been on a plane in 2019: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2021-01-31/wa-worst-january-road-toll-in-a-decade/13104800

Well said. A point worth making – let’s take your example of cardiovascular disease – is that the most serious cases likely received treatment, for whatever good it might have done: if you had a heart attack in 2020, your wife probably called an ambulance. The missing medical treatment comes from the mild chest pains that you ignored, or dismissed as heartburn: in 2019 you might have said better safe than sorry, but during the worst pandemic in history? Assuming you could get in to see your doctor, or that they were willing to see you. (Many doctors conducted their examinations over the phone. What a waste of fucking time that was.)

My working assumption is that the first wave of deaths, in the first half of the year, were genuine “COVID” deaths, whatever that is, but subsequent rises in mortality begin to include lockdown deaths; eventually, COVID deaths will largely subside, but lockdown deaths will continue occurring for five years, or even longer, if you take a more actuarial view.

Re: legerdemain: again, well said. Frankly – and I know this perhaps isn’t the point you were making, but it needs saying – “global conspiracy to rebadge a bad flu season” is starting to emerge as one of the stronger hypotheses. Doubtless some will say, “Oh, that’s just a conspiracy theory” – well, yes, it literally is, but it fits the known facts better than some of the alternative theories:

– “crowding out”: has this phenomena ever been observed before?
– “masks work”: lol, no they don’t
– this year’s flu vaccine was 100% effective: don’t be ridiculous
– government has fucked up the flu numbers by accident: in every country in the world?
– every government in the world has fucked up the flu numbers on purpose: far-fetched, but so is the idea that (almost) every country in the world would shit their pants and shut down their societies over what is all things considered a relatively mild pandemic. (Relative, before some whinger starts kvetching, to the response we gave it: there have been at least 3 more serious pandemics in the last 100 years, none of which occasioned the closure of society.) Isn’t it weird that they all reacted in the same way, despite that reaction being counter to epidemiological best practice and their own pandemic response plans? How did that happen? Can we at least “just ask questions”?

It has been confirmed. Data is very strong. Explanation that the anti-covid countermeasures (social distancing, masking and lockdowns) are responsible for dramatic reduction of flu cases is very compelling.

To you, perhaps. To me, it’s an open question. Anti-COVID measures didn’t work on COVID but were perfectly successful on flu?

I’d like to know whether flu surveillance is based on random population surveys, or on reports from doctors whose patients present with influenza symptoms: in the latter case, it should be obvious how flu could decrease when there’s another respiratory virus killing the people whom the flu would otherwise kill.

Worth considering in the Australian case that Australia saw its worst-ever flu season in 2019, continuing at those abnormally high rates into 2020… but so far as I know, it didn’t see higher-than-usual deaths from flu – but did see a 6.8% increase in all-cause mortality. (Which did not occasion the shutting down of the country, FYI.) Point being, it’s complicated. Was there significant cross-immunity between the ’19/’20 and ’20/’21 flu strains? Was it flu that killed all those extra people in 2019, leaving a smaller at-risk population in 2020? I personally cannot consider any hypothesis here to be confirmed.

What if you need fewer number of viruses to initiate covid infection than in the case of flu?

But this requires that the reduction in viral particles occasioned by masks etc is precisely enough to eliminate flu almost entirely without making a dent in COVID numbers. This is a remarkable outcome.

Very little flu in the UK last year or this, because people weren’t socialising either inside or outside of work. Shows IMHO the comparative infectiousness of Covid v flu (and of course a lot of the over 60s have flu jabs).

Re: the bolded: you might believe that, but it’s hardly been proven. I might point out that (1) flu is plenty infectious enough, and (2) household isolation is argued to increase transmission, but apparently did not for the flu in 2020, and (3) most COVID transmission occurred in hospitals and nursing homes, but, again, not for the flu. (Even though, correct me if I’m wrong, it normally rampages through nursing homes once a year.)

So either we had total 100% coverage of a totally 100% effective flu vaccine; or masks/social distancing/lockdowns are effective, and just effective enough to completely eradicate flu, but not to make a dent in COVID; or COVID infections somehow preclude flu infections (the “crowding out” hypothesis); or the government is bodging the flu numbers, accidentally or otherwise; or there’s something else I don’t know about. And we don’t know which of those is true.

I don’t think you need to see the rainbow on his lanyard to know that John Brennan is okay with the gay

Ohio places children in foster care at a rate 10% percent higher than the national average. The share of Black children removed from homes is more than double their share of the population.

It’s a Stolen Generation! I predict efforts to rectify this problem will end well for all concerned

Also the misattribution of deaths to COVID is widespread. As an example, in the case of America, there was no Flu Season last winter !

I agree with the first part, but the second is more complicated. I’d need to confirm whether the flu’s absence was worldwide, or just certain countries; whether it’s just a function of less testing under a presumption that flu cases were covid cases, etc.

My understanding is that the CDC conducted more flu tests than normal in America, so either coronavirus crowded out the flu somehow, or we need to posit a conspiracy to rebadge the flu. Or there’s some other explanation. Or I’m wrong.

Hospital can not work as usual due to covid-19. So of course these deaths should be attributed to covid-19 . Note if hospital would work normally there would be a lot of deaths due covid-19 infection after operation.

This is the excuse given, but it’s bollocks. Plenty of hospitals were half-empty all year for fear of COVID hordes, and that’s just hospitals: remember people were kept away from their GP, from specialists, from cancer screenings, etc, etc. This is not the fault of the disease but entirely the choice of the authorities.

…non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) to slow down COVID spread also decrease mortality caused by other infectious agents such as the influenza virus.

That’s the explanation offered for the absent flu, but it’s hardly been proven. (I find it far-fetched.) One alternative is that COVID “crowds out” influenza; there might be others.

So these NPIs may have caused non-COVID excess deaths (as in not receiving treatments at hospitals for heart disease) and non-COVID deficit deaths (as in not getting the flu), so what matters is the balance of non-COVID excess and deficit deaths caused by COVID-oriented NPIs.

Yes, but what needs to be taken into account is how much of that excess and that deficit would’ve been covered by influenza or COVID, respectively. The NPI deaths: would those individuals have died in a normal 2020? (Many wouldn’t have, I think.) The missing influenza dead: were they killed by COVID? (Mostly, yes.)

The IHME appear to be presuming that those deficit dead wouldn’t have been killed by COVOD – and further, they presume little-to-no NPI deaths (because they claim not to have data*) and that all excess death in 2020 was COVID. You can see why they end up with such an enormous number.

* That’s bullshit, by the way: even in the absence of hard data, educated guesses are possible. For instance, many countries have tracked the decline in cancer screenings in 2020; one could find out how many cancer screenings lead to a diagnosis, to death, and can therefore puzzle out a guess as to the excess cancer deaths. It wouldn’t be accurate, but neither are COVID deaths. I’m just saying, if they wanted to try to quantify it, they could.

I had a look at how they crunch the numbers. In short:

1. They assume COVID deaths are most or all of the excess deaths
2. They don’t know how to count the excess deaths from lockdowns, so they don’t count them at all
3. They do some jiggery-pokery to bring down the numbers for other causes of death (I suspect)

And whaddya know, when you assume all deaths were corona deaths, and lockdowns had no cost, it turns out that the COVID death toll goes through the roof! Emphases mine:

Estimating the fraction of excess mortality that is direct COVID-19 deaths

Deaths that are directly due to COVID-19 are likely underreported in many locations, particularly in settings where COVID-19 testing is in short supply. Most excess mortality is likely misclassified COVID-19 deaths. An analysis by the Netherlands statistical agency suggested that all excess deaths in the Netherlands were directly due to COVID-19.2 In fact, their analysis actually suggested that direct COVID-19 deaths may be higher than estimated excess deaths because deaths due to some other causes have declined during the pandemic.

The second driver of excess mortality is reduced health care utilization for many causes;3 however, the impact of reduced health care use on health outcomes is harder to prove. […] The impact of changes in health care utilization on excess mortality may be observed in later years, rather than in 2020 or the first quarter of 2021.

Third, convincing evidence has been found that rates of anxiety and depression have increased, which might in turn lead to increases in deaths from suicide.5 To date, the evidence on increased suicide is very limited.6 Opioid deaths, on the other hand, have clearly increased7 in the United States. Compared to past trends, opioid deaths increased by around 15,000 since March 2020. Evidence on whether this has also occurred in other countries awaits further study.

Fourth, we reviewed the evidence on decreases in injuries as a result of reductions in mobility. We analyzed data from 12 countries that provide cause of death data by week or month, which allows us to test whether some causes decreased significantly during 2020 and whether that decrease was related to the decreases in mobility that have been reported. This analysis suggests that globally, injury mortality decreased by 5% in 2020 due to reductions in mobility. At the global level, this translates into a reduction of approximately 215,000 deaths.

Which 12 countries? This sounds like the kind of number that could very widely from country-to-country, so extrapolating from the wrong 12 countries could give a very misleading number.

And how much of that data? Some places saw a decline in traffic mortality, for instance earlier in 2020 – and then an increase above pre-pandemic levels later in the year, continuing into 2021.

Fifth, some infectious causes of death may have declined during the pandemic due to the behavioral changes associated with control of the pandemic, including mask use and reduced contact with others. Causes that have clearly declined are influenza,8,9 respiratory syncytial virus,10 measles,11 and possibly other respiratory viruses and viral diarrheas. For example, influenza cases in the United States declined 99.3% from the winter season of 2019–2020 to the winter season of 2020–2021. Combining the reductions reported in different countries in influenza, respiratory syncytial virus, and measles, the global reduction in mortality from these causes may be larger than 400,000 deaths.

This is starting to smell like statistical legerdemain to me. First, they’re assuming “behavioural changes” to be the cause – but “behavioural changes” didn’t make much of a dent in COVID. (Inb4 “hurr durr, COVID’s so much more infectious so it goes right thru the mask”, then why are you wearing one?)

Further, how many of those 400,000 deaths missed from flu etc were people who died from COVID? Are those deaths, already counted under COVID-19 deaths, being subtracted from all-cause mortality, thus requiring phantom COVID deaths to make up the total? Is this how they arrive at their huge numbers? Obviously I’m far too innumerate to work that out, all I’m sure is that that 400,000 figure is a bunch of bollocks unless it refers to people who would’ve died from flu etc but didn’t die from COVID, i.e., people under the age of 80. (But that shouldn’t be anywhere near 400,000 people…)

Sixth, deaths from some chronic conditions such as ischemic heart disease or chronic respiratory disease declined in some months of 2020, most notably in May and June in Europe. These declines were most likely due to the fact that frail individuals who died from COVID-19 earlier in the year would otherwise likely have died from these chronic conditions. The strongest evidence for this effect is that excess mortality was negative in some countries in Europe in June when the reported COVID-19 death rate was very low. In aggregate, this effect likely reduced mortality by only 2% based on our analysis.

Again, it didn’t actually reduce mortality at all, because those people still died.

Overall, the evidence suggests reductions of 615,000 deaths, or potentially more, stemming from behavioral changes at the global level. The main potential increases in excess mortality due to deferred care and increases in drug overdose and depression are hard to quantify at this point or are of a much smaller magnitude. Given that there is insufficient evidence to estimate these contributions to excess mortality, for now we assume that total COVID-19 deaths equal excess mortality. For the reasons presented in this section, we believe that this is likely an underestimate. As the evidence is strengthened in the coming months and years, it is likely that we will revise our estimates of the total COVID-19 death rate upward in future iterations of this work, once we can properly take into account the drivers described in this section.

lol, how the fuck are they gonna revise it upward from the maximum? Oh right, nobody died from anything else in 2020: if you got hit by a bus, that’s COVID; if you’re walking down the street and a piano falls on your head, that’s COVID.

Big picture: it’s very misleading to use the COVID death toll; it’s the excess deaths we should be more concerned about. And it’s even more misleading to presume no impact on mortality from the near-shuttering of the world’s economy and healthcare systems.

7 million? It’s the worst tragedy in human history!

It all comes down to the simple fact that significantly more people has died during the last ~14 months than normally.

Right, but significantly more people were scared or forced away from interacting with the medical system, significantly more people were impoverished, significantly more people were socially isolated… all of that is going to drive mortality upwards. (Significantly.)

Actually, not even really “right”: many of these countries have ageing population, and so should have seen rising deaths anyway; for many (if not all) of these countries, all-cause mortality is up to the same level that it was only a few years ago.

And as the other commenter points out, if Ivermectin had been approved for use, supposedly a very large number of the dead might have lived.

Clean version: is that a name or a personal ad?

Thank you, try the veal etc

Keisha Lance Bottoms

Is that a name or a Grinder profile?

You’d need to also find a replacement for Slack…

I really don’t understand this aspect of modern business: first, that, despite all this communications technology, companies still prefer to concentrate all their workers in a tall building in the middle of a big city; second, that, when they do let the employees work remotely, they insist that they spend the entire day communicating with each other as much as if they were in an office: phone, e-mail, Zoom, Slack (the clue is in the name there)…

In ye olden days, the East India Company and others were able to run enormous global enterprises despite the fact that it took months to get a message from London to Bombay. Similarly, in WW2, the Wermacht supposedly gave a lot of autonomy to field commanders.

I guess the point I’m making is why can’t modern companies just set goals, targets, and other parameters, and turn their employees loose? “Give me a quarterly report and make sure the numbers have gone up x%.”

My suspicion is that, for quite a lot of jobs, if you took out Zoom meetings, there’d be nothing left.

Checking Wikipedia: turnout’s down about 15% from the general election. I don’t know how much of that is because it’s a by-election. Tories gained about half as many votes as Labour lost, and an independent candidate got nearly 10%, so all-in-all this looks more like a “plague on both their houses” result than a ringing endorsement of the Tories per se.

Young weirdoes on Twitter tell me that the Gates divorce, like the Bezos, is a ploy to skirt tax laws. I’ve been wondering what the mature and sensible Unz commentariat thinks.

Guess I was wrong. Serves me right for watching Mythbusters in the first place I suppose

Looks like it was a wide angle lens.

Wouldn’t that suggest that there was more distance between Joe and Tiny Old Lady Carter than we suppose, though?

Eyeballing the picture, we can see Joe’s foot level with that chair leg, but his hand is on the arm of the chair Carter’s sitting in. Is that enough distance to achieve this level of distortion? He’s supposedly only one or two feet further forward, but looms large like Ozymandias, king of kings…

I’m still a little skeptical that there’s not something fishier going on, but either way, it speaks to the degree of incompetence and nervousness among the Biden camp: feeling the need to explain that, no, that really is Joe Biden in those pictures, and he really is the president, and those are really his signatures on the executive orders – and that water mark is not from the presidential drool but from an aide who spilled some Evian…

Being sensitive to this perception, I say, but still releasing a photo where he looks Godzilla terrorising a nursing home. Attack of the 50-Foot Biden!

I think Steve’s mostly right. Far larger than the group you’re describing is the ordinary Americans caught between two incompatible points of view. The 17th century shitposter lays it out quite clearly: you’re either a racist or an antiracist, or trying to pretend otherwise.

Where he’s wrong – or at least pushing uphill – is in trying to get black people to accept that they’re naturally inferior. What self-respecting black guy is going to agree with that?

Maybe it won’t matter, if they’re a demographically-shrinking group, and the other non-white races don’t look at them through rose-tinted glasses. Perhaps in twenty years black kvetching will simply be ignored.

…the missing incumbent was declared to have died in a 1972 plane crash in the Alaskan bush.

Okay, two things…

First of all, has anybody actually ever crunched the numbers to see first what proportion of air travellers are politicians and other VIPs, and then what proportion of air crash dead are the same? Seems like rather a lot of these fellows are dying in plane crashes…

And second, regarding this particular fellow who died in a plane crash:

Nicholas Joseph Begich Sr. (April 6, 1932 – disappeared October 16, 1972) was an American politician who served as a member of the United States House of Representatives from Alaska. He is presumed to have died in the crash of a light aircraft in Alaska in 1972; his body was never found.

I think we may have found D.B. Cooper.

Hi Craig, that’s a load of bollocks – the question is whether a falling bullet reaches a velocity sufficient to cause injury, but apparently it does, see here or possibly here, although the latter is paywalled and I can’t read it. But it’s referenced in the former:

Bullets fired into the air during celebrations return at a speed fast enough to penetrate the skin and cause internal damage to other organs in the path of the migrating bullet. The bullet’s velocity required for skin penetration
is between 148 and 197 feet per second. A velocity of less than 200 feet per second, which is easily obtained by a
celebratory gunfire, is capable of fracturing bone and even causing intracranial penetration [4]. Spent bullets
have the capability of reaching up to 600 feet per second during their downfall, and thus they have the ability to
inflict damage to multiple body cavities [4]. The larger caliber bullets (ie, .45-caliber) reach a higher terminal
velocity compared with the smaller caliber bullets (ie, .30-caliber), because of the proportion of their weight to their diameter [4]. Terminal velocity is difficult to calculate with falling bullets because wind resistance and updrafts can cause a spent bullet to land miles away from the initially fired site [2].

I remained this as being false from an old episode of Mythbusters, but either I remembered it wrong or I shouldn’t have been listening to a TV show in the first place.

I’m still a little skeptical, though, for two reasons: firstly, while it makes sense that a higher calibre bullet will have greater mass and thus attain greater velocity over the same fall, it also makes sense that the higher calibre bullet won’t rise as high in the first place, and thus won’t be falling so far.

Secondly, I wonder how many people claiming to be injured by falling bullets are lying because snitches get stiches?

I thought it was impossible to get killed by a falling bullet if you shoot a gun into the air?

yes hello how do i buy the russian stonks thank you

I agree the internet changed things. But in the old days, the feller that worked at the record store or your opinionated mate in your dorm room etc could have also told you what other music you might like.

You say “delineate influences”, I said “tell you what sort of music it is,” either way I agree that this can be a valuable convenience. My point is that many reviews don’t contain or restrict themselves to this information. Critics tend to indulge themselves instead, and in so doing, mislead the reader. Surely you must have differed sharply with a critic once or twice?

And getting a musical education from a writer is fine, but, again, that’s distinct from the question of quality. It’s one thing to tell the reader that the kids these days are listening to Japanese death techno, it’s another thing to tell them that the new Tamagotcha! single is “an autistic piledriver whose frenzied, skittering vocals leave the listener in much the same condition that Mothra left Tokyo. 4 and a half stars”

(And then you listen to it and it’s just meh 2010’s electro, and the vocals are neither frenzied nor skittering)

Go on Amazon and see how many Diana Ross albums there are . Or take any artist of your choice with a long career. If you just want to buy one and you wanted to have her best work, which would be the best album?

As you go on to explain, reviews are a poor metric, and it’s subjective anyway. The question is, which one will you like best? And the only way to know is to hear them all.

Obviously you’re not going to do that, but if you just want a good proxy measure to weed out the shit, why not popularity?

Reviews can be useful for your purposes, but they can achieve that purpose in a single paragraph. Here, I’ll review Master of Puppets:

Arguably Metallica’s best album. Eight tracks of mostly uptempo thrash metal, running about forty minutes. No ballads, although one or two tracks have some softer parts. Lots of long instrumental sections, with a focus on awesome guitar riffs and shredding solos. One track is entirely instrumental. The singing’s good, and the lyrics are okay, especially by heavy metal standards. 9 or 10 out of 10 if you like that sort of thing, probably unlistenable if you don’t.

Compare that to Robert Christgau’s review of the same, which is unrepresentative of music criticism only insofar as it’s short.

All you need to know, to help you decide what to buy, is:
– What sort of music is it?
– Is it any good?

You don’t need some failed novelist jerking themselves off for 800 words.

Probably though their new ivermectin would be just chemically distinct enough to evade copyright and cause horrible side-effects

fizer announced late last month they had begun Phase 1 clinical trials of the drug, called PF-07321332. Its effectiveness is due to protease inhibitors in the drug that bind to viral enzymes, preventing viruses from replicating in the cell.

Seriously, does anyone know if that’s the same mechanism by which ivermectin or some other off-brand drug works against COVID?

We’re not talking about the same people: the “polyamorous” chicks are a small goblin-looking subset of the liberal chicks you’re describing

Rightio. All I’m saying is that plus or minus amplitude is equally capable of being detected, by a computer program analysing soundwaves or by the naked eye. Observe this simplified example.

I see, and you, for some reason, think that masks are more efficacious at preventing transmission than social distancing, despite the fact that this is not what your government is telling you.

Under the paradigm you’re operating under, you’re at more risk dining out masked than dining at home unmasked. (IRL: it depends.) So why not stay home?

Doing the Lord’s work there, son.

Have you heard about Pfizer’s mooted antiviral? How much do you want to bet it’s just ivermectin under another name? (and at a much higher price…)

You don’t want a drug that’s proven safe and effective by researchers who don’t have a conflict of interest, but you do want this vaccine?

More like banging their construction worker neighbor while chatting with the soyfriend about how awful men are.

Have you seen these chicks? Chad Carpenter has better options.

Ah, but the value there wasn’t in discovering good music, but in discovering good music ahead of the plebs.

I used to read a lot of reviews myself, but I got burned way too many times: “This album is utterly essential, literally life-changing, it’s simply a must-buy!” (Narrator: it wasn’t.)

I can’t begin to make sense of what this tweet from Minneapolis is describing

This is down the street from George Floyd Square.

The intersection where George Floyd died has become a makeshift shrine and also an anarchist commune and crime-ridden hellhole. Remember the CHAZ in Seattle last year? Same thing. Police are afraid to enter, and are apparently being quite open about it. Minneapolis politicians were apparently saying that the problem would be resolved by the Chauvin verdict; apparently, it hasn’t. Quelle surprise.

More:

The Outkick, “WHITE PEOPLE ENTERING GEORGE FLOYD SQUARE ARE GREETED WITH SPECIAL INSTRUCTIONS”

Minneapolis Star-Tribune, “Near George Floyd Square: Revolution by day, devolution by night”, March 15th, 2021

this may be Ron’s 4-D chess move to maintain plausible deniability for the entire site

They say the same thing about Alex Jones, and Veteran’s Today, and QAnon, and on, and on…

Haven’t they been proving this for 74 years?